Are deprecated. RIP. I found a truly excellent example of ContentProvider with SQLite, populating a ListView, here. It's probably a little more complicated than it needs to be, but then again this whole ContentProvider thing seems so needlessly complicated. Another good write-up is here, covering both the old SimpleCursorAdapter and ContentProvider.
But if you want other applications to access the data, you need to use ContentProvider. No turning back now, as they say.