Device details, and encoding advice

Hi there
We have a kenyan wap site, hosted in Kenya, built specifically for mobile devices.
I have two issues with Opera mini (a very popular mobile browser in kenya) which I'm looking for some help in resolving:

1. I would like to be able to record device details of visitors to my site, even if Opera mini is the browser.
I read on another thread that this may be possible by doing a media query, so exactly how is that call made? and what is requested. Then how would we deduce device make and model from the media query? It may solve an issue like how wide the device screen size is, but what if I specifically want to know the device type that is accessing my site?

2. If Opera Mini is a mobile browser, and I build a Mobile Wap site that is specifically tailored to be shown in the best possible fashion on a mobile device, why does opera mini still need to pass the site through it's encoding servers based in Norway? Surely Opera mini should be clever enough to deduce that it does not need to make a time consuming round trip from Kenya to Norway and back again to re-render a wap site that does not need any re-rendering whatsoever. (I have evidence to back this up as a large majority of our pageviews come from Opera Servers in Norway)

Many thanks in advance.
Tim