A Google executive Thursday heaped praise on Apple’s iPhone, even with his company set to challenge Apple in this same space with its Android mobile computing platform.

During the cloud computing-focused Office 2.0 conference, Google’s Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, revealed his list of 10 things that can be done in the cloud today that could not have been done a year ago. Although the list focused on Google technologies, including its newly introduced Chrome browser, the tenth spot on the list was reserved for praise of Apple’s iPhone.

“I’m a huge Apple fan, I’m a huge iPhone fan. It’s really opened up computing in the mobile world,” Glotzbach said, emphasizing the iPhone’s impact on cloud computing. With his iPhone, he said he can perform tasks such as accessing e-mail and documents and even flip through the presentation he was set to give Thursday morning. “The mobile landscape has really been transformed by the iPhone,” he said.

Google, however, has its upcoming Android mobile platform, which could become a formidable challenger to iPhone. Asked after his presentation whether he would switch to an Android unit, Glotzbach took a wait-and-see approach. “We’ll have to see when it comes out. I use the best device that there is for getting what I need done,” he said.