Short answer. We currently detect the smaller tablets as full size tablets.
As @lordandrew says we do both user agent sniffing and device width css responsiveness. At the most basic level the css is device width dependent. When you resize your desktop window you can actually see the different breaks where the layout changes based solely on width. We then also have a device test which does things like turn off the WYSIWYG editor and in the case of tables set the meta device width tag to force the width of the devices to 980 pixels wide. Not an uncommon thing to do and it is the view which the iPad uses on sites which are not responsive anyhow.
We did this because we felt that the 980 wide view of the site looked much better on the iPad and other large tablets in both horizontal and vertical orientation. The Fire, iPad Mini and the Nexus 7 are in that odd small tablet size. We would need to do one extra check for these tablets as well and give maybe the 768 width size. From a very small sample of people with these smaller devices they all preferred the wider view on the small tablets anyhow. Not saying it is not doable but we are a little stretched as it is to add one more layer.
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